Saturday, May 31, 2014

I’m in a hotel in Bayside San Diego.
The Midway looms out the window to the left, massive, and kept in great shape,
externally, so that tourists get a chance to see what those old floating
fortresses from the big one were all about. Earlier, I’d taken Adam down to see
it and was surprised and overjoyed to see some instances of true Republican Party
art – an art that evokes warm patriotic feelings through the kind of unabashed
kitsch which is so vulnerable to mockery that it doesn’t deserve even to be
mocked. One was an enormous painted statue that took the famous iconic moment
of the sailor kissing a woman in Times Square on V-E day – when Americans were
under the delusion that they were celebrating the end of the war in Europe –
and monumentalized it, the woman bent in
the man’s arms, dressed in a short white skirt and with white stockings, the
sailor in blue, his sailor hat on his curly head, his mouth about the size of
my arm from the hand to the elbow on her mouth, ditto the size and with thicker
lips, for the delectation of tourists. Myself, I didn’t have a camera, or I
would surely have asked someone to photograph me under this monstrosity. Why
not? Sometimes, the plunge into the moronic inferno is a tonic to the soul. The
other is the Bob Hope Memorial, where a statue of the comic stands in front of
an appreciative and ethnically diverse group of Gis, posed in attitudes of
rapture and applause. Because overdetermination is the heart and soul of
kitsch, there is a soundtrack of Hope’s routines perpetually running in the
background…

To give you an idea, then, of the
place. This is where we are. I’m in the
hotel seven stories up, and I’m in the hall with Adam, who is fascinated with
the view outside the big window. Up the hall comes your standard issue, clean
limbed American whitetype, circa thirty years old: he has a friendly face, and
he says, pointing at Adam, wants to be spiderman, right? Nice guy, so I reply,
I think that or a politician – he likes to get above the people and give
speeches. This brought about the unexpected reply that this man was in
politics, but thought this “cycle” would be his last. I’m going into private
equity, the man says. I mumble something. They are scumbags, but they are
honest scumbags, he says. Then, pointing at Adam, he says, Never see his social
security.

I reply, getting to my feet, that on
the contrary, he’s french, and he certainly will. The guy begins to back to the
elevator, which has arrived. You know, I say, Adam his mother and me spent five
days at the hospital before he was born and it costs less than a thousand
dollars. The man is now in the elevator, and he smirks. Paid for by the
taxpayers, he says. Before I could reply, the smirk vanished.

In that instance, I had several
arguments and responses I would like to have launched. Most pertinently, that
those taxpayers had all been born, and thus were beneficiaries themselves of
the French system. Or that doing single entry accounting is not a good way of
getting into private equity – you have to count not only what you pay for but
what you receive.

However, what struck me was that
just by making arguments, I lost. The man had the victor’s smirk. It is even a
cognitive smirk – a smirk that your thought, going around a corner, runs smack into
and is smothered forever. At one time, the left had that smirk in the twentieth
century. But for a long time now, it has been the exclusive possession of a
certain rightwing type – the kind of upper twenty percent looking guy who
repeats cliches (such as that about the honest scumbag) shamelessly, more as a
way of showing an insignia, of asserting a place in the lockerroom, than of
actually meaning anything.

That smirk is, of course, on the
neck of the vast majority of Americans, but it is respected, revered and
imitated by those it trounces on because, well, it is the smirk of victory. Why
put yourself on the losing side? Especially when, because it is the losing
side, you know that the losers, if they have a chance and actually gained power,
will only fuck things up.

Sunday, May 25, 2014

We are traveling in the Boulder Denver area this weekend. Denver has wonderful houses and a lotta rain, and I got sick yesterday. I took some pills, we put Adam to bed, then I lay down to sleep and had this dream.I was at a comic book festival. I was with three people. The only one in focus was a tall, geeky looking guy – who I began to see was Stephen Merchant, Ricky Gervais’s partner on the Extras. He gave me a computer to write things on, but whatever I wrote appeared on the screen as something different, in Greek or Cyrilac script. I got mad and, like Adam, threw the computer down. Later Stephen told me this was a test, and then he revealed that I was being inducted into the CIA. He introduced me to the man with him – Richard Nixon. Nixon was much shorter than I expected. He had a sour look on his face. He was wearing a sweater that I somehow recognized. It was cream colored with brown braiding, very thick, with a sort of ruff, or turtleneck. It was, in short, the kind of sweater one bought in the seventies. I was given a dossier and told my job. I was very happy, because I was sure that the pay was good, and the work sounded easy. It had to do with codes and comic books. But at this point I must have begun waking up, because I began to worry about Nixon. I had shaken his hand! I had called him Mr. Nixon! Wasn’t I opposed to Nixon? At this point I did wake up.I conclude from this dream that my subconscious has become reactionary, which is potentially embarrassing. On the other hand, it did dress Nixon in the most ridiculous costume and made him short. So the subconscious of my subconscious must know what’s what.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.